


Fire (Burn for me)

by LynnDenbaum



Series: lynn's messiest GO oneshots in all of history [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), Again, Crowley probably has unidentified PTSD, Fire, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I am bad with tags, Idiots in Love, Light Swearing, M/M, Tell me to add tags, but not too bad, it escalated, should have been a 1k thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 16:29:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20474078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LynnDenbaum/pseuds/LynnDenbaum
Summary: Crowley was afraid of fire.It was an odd motion for a demon to have, because the very streets of hell are literally paved with hellfire. With angry blazing flames in darkest shades of crimson and black that tried its very best to keep up the appearance of angry, biting cobblestones.(And here we have yet another oneshot, Lynn wrote while she was deadly tired. Thank you all for having me.)





	Fire (Burn for me)

**Author's Note:**

> So...  
I needed something nice in my life, and because as a writer, you can literally write the stories you want to read for yourself, I just did exactly that.  
Please enjoy!

Fire.  
The bright dancing, swirling wisps of red and yellow, sparks igniting the dephts of the night, darker than the deepest ocean, cold and unforgiving like the midst of a winter storm in the rough mountains.  
  
Swiftly changing forms, licking into the air in an futile attempt to _ reach _ higher, wider, further.  
To devour the very stars.  
It grows and swells with the shifting of the wind and shows images of never happened tales and long forgotten lies.  
And it sets you aflame like a dry branch. Burns you out.  
Erases you until there is nothing left but a shadow of your existence in a plane where before had been firm matter and nice shapes.  
  
Crowley had stared at the burning building with utterly deep and unburied bottomless fear and desperation.  
It was an odd motion for a demon to have, because the very streets of hell are literally paved with hellfire.  
With angry blazing flames in darkest shades of crimson and black that tried its very best to keep up the appearance of angry, biting cobblestones.  
  
Any demon in his right mind would enjoy the sight of flaring tongues of fire devouring wooden logs, or even better, human settlements.  
But either Crowley was not in his right mind, or not very a usual demon, for he hated fire with all that was left of his conscious brain.  
Especially this fire. In this place.  
  
Sure, it could not exactly have _ harmed _ him in a way it would humans, but everytime he looked at licking, dancing fireshine, he felt himself gloriously catapulted back to that fateful day over 6000 years ago, when he took a long distance swan dive into 2687 litres of molten stone and sulphur.  
  
He could even still feel it prickle over his skin and devour his halo. Stain his beautiful feathers.  
Disgusting, horrific, painful, cruel.  
No, he really, _really_ didn’t like fire.  
  
But he didn’t exactly have had a choice now, did he?  
Without even having stopped in his movements, he had snapped the door to the bookshop open.  
  
The rest of the memory was a blur.  
Flames around his head, flames to his feet, tasting his shoes.  
Flames on the walls, on the curtains, on the shelves.  
Falling pages, blurring heat, the hard water beam of the firefighters that had toppled him over.  
The floor coming closer.  
Then the burning, stinging realization.  
_ Aziraphale was gone. _  
  
He remembered, quite clearly the feeling of loss and hurt. Pain and loneliness.  
  
He hadn’t even realized, that he had taken the book, until he was back in the Bentley, with the charcoaled envelope in his hands.  
  
He hadn’t even realized, he had started crying, until wet drops had stained his shaking hands.

  
“My dear?”  
The soft voice pulled him out of his thoughts, like a fish in a net.  
Crowley glanced up at a very worried looking, very soft eyed Aziraphale, that was definitely closer than he had been, when the demon had last looked.  
  
“Uh..bm….”  
“Are you quite alright? Would you maybe care for some tea?”  
“hmpf...”, said Crowley.  
  
Then he quickly averted his eyes and grabbed his sunglasses that lay on the low table next to the a-little-too-comfortable couch and put them back on, effectively hiding his emotions behind the dark shades.  
“M’ Fine angel. Anyways, what were we talking about?”  
  
The angel did not buy it, he could see that.  
_ let it go let it go, please just let it go. I can’t think now. Can’t talk now. let it go._  
__  
Maybe Aziraphale had felt Crowley’s uneasiness, because he indeed let it go and repeated the sentence he had said before, but not without sending him one more soft and yet suspicious glance.  
  
“Alright, my dear. So. About the thing with the Eggs Benedict: Of course the one thing that a very rich meal needs, to become even more filling, would be Sauce Hollandaise. There is no other way to create a soft and at the….”  
  
Again, Crowley drifted away.  
He studied the soft and elegantly curved features of Aziraphale’s cheeks, of his forehead. His eyes followed the light hairline down to the angels ears and then even lower towards his neck, only to scoop up again and trace the outline of his nose with the ghost fingers of his stare.  
Soft blue eyes, that looked at him now with a loving passion about the topic of his speech, while his lips moved sinfully to form even more enthusiastic words, that Crowley didn’t hear.  
  
And then, he saw the flames again.  
Around Aziraphale’s head, to his shoes, on the walls, on the shelves, and he had to swallow hard and softly shake his head to clear his mind again.  
_ No flames here, dumbass. _ __  
Because of course not. It was the same place but the circumstances had changed oh so drastically.  
They were free! And there was no way Aziraphale would leave him again, right?  
_ Right?! _ __  
  
While he stared at the bottom lip of the angel in front of him, his gaze luckily well hidden beneath his dark shades, his mind started wandering even further into the distance.  
Back to the very beginning.  
“You shalt burn!”  
The Archangel had said, before casting him out.  
“You shalt fall and you shalt burn!”  
And burn he did.  
And fall he did, too.  
  
But it was nothing in comparison to the pain he had felt here. In this very store.  
And we’re back to that topic...

Apparently Crowley couldn’t think of anything else.  
  
“Dearest, are you crying?”  
For the second time Aziraphale ripped him out of his downwards spiraling crash-train of thoughts and pulled him back into reality.  
Was he?

“Oh Crowley..”  
_ Oh shit. _  
The angel leaned over to where the demon sat and softly took off the sunglasses again to reveal Crowleys, indeed tearfilled eyes.  
  
Soft, gentle fingers wandered over the sensitive skin underneath the demon’s eyes and wiped away hot, stinging tears.  
Their gazes met, soft into pained, loving into longing. Blue dipped in gold, swirled, creating a little galaxy in the tranquil backroom of the restored bookshop  
“I am alright. We both are.”  
_ We are alright. We are here. we are alive. Alright. here. alive. Alright. here. alive. _  
Aziraphales smile widened.  
“We made it. We are free. And no-one can take that away from us.”  
He gingerly cupped Crowley’s now furiously blushing face with his soft hands and gently traced the hard line of his left cheekbone with the index finger of his right hand.  
  
Where the angel’s skin touched his, Crowley felt his face burning up, his nerves tingling.  
Oh how much he wished he could interpret more into this moment. How he wished he could bury his hands into Aziraphales neck, caress his round cheeks, stroke his soft white-ish hair, devour his sinful mouth with his, take him, claim him.

He sighed, then he smiled.

“You're right, angel. ‘course you are.”  
  
Aziraphales smile dimmed slightly, as he watched the emotions flutter through the demon’s eyes in a rapid, neverending train.  
The words were spoken shakily, too uncertain to be honest.  
“‘s just, Y’know… The fire.”  
  
“Oh, my dear. It couldn’t have hurt you. You do know that, don’t you?”  
The angel said softly, still gingerly stroking his friends face.  
“ ‘Course I know that. That’s not the point. Point is, you were gone.”  
Crowley snapped, now quickly pushing back, out of reach from Aziraphale, then quickly stood up and started pacing the small room with wobbly knees.  
“What was I gonna do, if you were gone? ‘Mean, you were _ gone Aziraphale. _ I _ felt, _ that you were gone. I knew it even before I stormed into that inferno like a total idiot.”

The atmosphere had changed abruptly.  
Had they really been talking about food just a minute before?  
“You… stormed in?”  
Crowley stopped his pacing to give Aziraphale a dry look out of his golden eyes.  
“‘Course I did. Thought you knew that. Can’t stand by, when you get yourself burned, right?”  
“Oh, Crowley…”

  
The demon blinked again, stared, then turned away to yet again hide his emotions.  
“Anyways. ‘s late. I should go.”  
He lingered a moment longer, shot Aziraphale a quick glance, then grabbed his jacket and shades and made his way over to the door.  
“Please wait.”  
  
He froze. Because of course he froze.  
Crowley had never had the ability to deny the angel anything. And he had long since stopped trying.  
(The last time had been in India, nearly 3500 years before, when the early indian people had started building some kind of religious system. Something about weda?  
He couldn’t quite recall, but after some fuzz about a monastery he had invited his angel to a huge bowl of rice and vegetables and they had shared some very pleasant litres of some very nice fruit wine and watched the stars.)  
  
“What?”  
His voice sounded more exhausted, than snappy and Aziraphale must have heard that, because he hummed softly and then rose to his feet to make his way over to Crowley.  
“Why don’t we drink a nice cup of tea and you tell me, what this is really about my dear?”  
“I...told you…”  
The demon protested weakly, while Aziraphale took his hands to lead him back to the unnaturally soft cushions.  
He just couldn’t say no.  
Not to him.  
  
The water in the boiler had _miraculously _stayed warm from earlier, so Aziraphale was back in the blink of an eye, two cups in his hands that diffused a herby, tart scent.  
It was nice.  
Reminded him of old Greece.  
Crowley took the one that was handed to him, without so much as glancing up and began swirling it around, like he occasionally did with his wine glasses.  
  
“So?”  
The angels voice was so very gentle, as he sat down on the pillows next to him. Crowley could feel the lowering of the couch when Aziraphale closed in on him, could feel the angel’s knee just barely touching his.  
When he looked up he found the same soft, bittersweet expression that had reverberated in the other’s voice unburied and plain to see in his eyes.  
Okay so, maybe he got himself in a bit of a situation here.

And maybe, just maybe he really thought about doing something he was not supposed to.

A quick glance down at his tea and some hopeful expectations directed at the fluid later, the earthy, yet fruity smell of rum combined with the herbal essences from the blend filled his now content nostrils. He took a big gulp.  
_ A bit better. _

“Angel”, he said warningly, when Aziraphale put his hand on his thigh in, what he probably thought was a soothing manner.  
It wasn’t.  
They sat in silence for a few moments, but the blonde didn’t take his hand away and finally Crowley gave in.  
  
“I hate fire”, he said.  
“I hate how it devours everything, how its stains black what had been colourful. I hate how it destroys and I hate it’s heat. I hate it so much, that I even prefer the bloody escalators to hell before the elevator, because when I take the elevator I have to cross the bloody flamey streets of bloody hell. Literally.  
And I came here to look for you. And there was fire, and I knew it couldn’t hurt me, but it could hurt you. And hurting you is hurting me, just worse.”  
A shuddery breath, to muster the self control to continue and _ not _ bury his head crying into his friends clothes.  
But before he could, Aziraphale softly asked:  
“So you ran in there, even though it frightened you. But… why?”  
  
Crowley furrowed his brow, because _ had the bloody angel not listened at all to what he just said?!_  
  
“I… When… How many times do I have to.. Can’t you see..”  
He stopped.  
Alright, so apparently, he was not even able to formulate one single straight sentence, as long as Aziraphale was involved, anymore.  
  
“‘S Like I said. I ran in there, ‘cause if you get hurt, that’d hurt me.”  
“I did understand _ that _ part. I just don’t… Ah… Why, Crowley?”  
A soft smirk tugged at the edges of Aziraphales mouth, while he kept his gaze locked firmly onto Crowley’s. His hand on the demons thigh softly started stroking his knee.  
But there was more in those eyes. In those deep, bottomless blue eyes.  
Those magnetic shades of azur, that always felt like coming home, whenever they touched his otherwise almost always uncomfortable skin.  
Little lines of lighter nuances swirled into each other into a complex pattern, older than earth itself in those irises, lining up like arrows, finally pointing to the exquisit dark black of the pupil.  
In there, right in the middle was a soft burning flame. The only fire, that did not frighten him. The only spark he would love to be ignited with, devoured by. The core of warmth and love and….  
And Aziraphale smirked at him with a knowing expression.  
One that had him thinking of a very smug teenager that said “Oh so you were worried about me? Could it be, that you care for me?”  
Oh. _ Oh!_  
__  
The angel knew!  
If he was right, and he was nearly certain now that he was, Aziraphale actually _ wanted _ him to spill his longest kept secret.  
Actually wanted him to confess, what he had never dared confess to anyone.  
What he occasionally got drunk over alone in his flat, just to whine about it to his plants. Without getting too specific though. Because walls had ears and he could not afford to give hell even more to go nuts over.  
But alright. He could do this. Right? He could totally say, what he was afraid to say. Express what he was afraid to even feel. Right?  
Yes. _ Yes. _  
Here goes nothing  
  
“‘Cause I….” He swallowed. If he was going to doom himself, he would at least formulate the sentence in an acceptable way.  
“Because”, he slightly overpronounced, “Because I love you.”  
  
And then his whole world suddenly, rapidly shifted, as Aziraphale threw himself forward and met Crowley’s lips with his in a desperate and fiery kiss.  
And as the demon felt his heart ignite with the spark that was Aziraphale, and as he burned brighter than every fire there had ever been, as the heat devoured him and blazed around him and took in every fiber of his existence,  
He could only think that maybe, just maybe, fire wasn’t all that bad.  
Maybe some things were worth burning for.

**Author's Note:**

> A huge Thank you to galexygay03 for beta-reading!
> 
> I am always kind of insecure about my grammar, as a non-native english speaker, so that meant a lot to me!


End file.
